September 2026

FT Rethink argues that geopolitical tensions are redirecting global trade rather than bringing it to an end. Governments are using tariffs, subsidies and industrial policy to pull manufacturing home and give greater weight to security, resilience and strategic autonomy. The article forecasts overlapping networks of trade, investment and influence around several centres of opportunity, and says the ability to adapt will matter in navigating that landscape.

Kenneth Rogoff argues that policymakers mistook a decade of low real interest rates for a durable feature of the economy, despite the historical volatility of rates and the difficulty of forecasting them. In a discussion with Steven Davis, he says that uncertainty should make governments wary of treating cheap borrowing as a reason to let debt rise without limit: higher rates can increase servicing costs and leave less room to respond to future shocks. Rogoff’s case is for fiscal prudence, not a ban on borrowing.

Marty Cagan says product teams’ pursuit of predictable plans can obscure how much they still need to learn about customers and solutions. Reflecting on regrets about his advice, the product thinker argues that teams often give too little weight to solution discovery, business viability and the leadership needed to act on evidence. As AI makes building easier, he says, clear thinking and a focus on outcomes—not output—matter more.

Dr K (Alok Kanojia) argues that gambling can appeal to young men who want ordinary forms of security—such as buying a house, taking a partner out and having more freedom—but cannot see a dependable way to achieve them. In his clinical experience, a bet can seem to bypass years of effort when education and work feel less reliable routes to success. Chris Williamson connects that appeal to the growing popularity of fast-money themes in financial content, while distinguishing that trend from the reasons individual people gamble.

Classical singer Gabriella Di Laccio argues that music history has excluded thousands of women composers, leaving audiences—and the datasets used to generate music—with an incomplete record of what was written. After finding an encyclopedia of women composers whose work she barely knew, she built a foundation that has identified more than 18,000. Di Laccio says recording that music is essential to making it audible to listeners and available to the systems shaping what they hear next.

A short deadline can make priorities clearer, Shaan Puri argues, pointing to the 99 days left in the year as time to make a meaningful change before New Year’s. Sam Parr, by contrast, emphasizes systems that limit the damage of habits such as running on stress or reacting too quickly. Their examples range from setting shorter time blocks to delaying business complaints until a weekly meeting, rather than expecting a deadline alone to change behavior.

Kevin Ryan argues that building durable companies requires looking past trends that are already popular and asking what they will make possible over the next decade. The AlleyCorp founder and investor says the task is to turn a broad shift into a specific product or supporting business—and to act when an idea keeps occupying his attention, even though no formula can reliably identify the winner. His examples range from DoubleClick and MongoDB to missed opportunities such as YouTube.

Brazil’s debt is pressing on households and businesses as high interest rates make borrowing harder to sustain, while interest on public debt exceeds 8% of GDP. As an election approaches, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is seeking to support household demand and social spending, while his main rival, Flávio Bolsonaro, has pledged spending controls but offered few details. Whoever wins will face difficult choices over how to bring debt under control.

John Coogan argues that Meta’s consumer-AI strategy is becoming clearer: rather than win every model benchmark, the company can pair capable agents with its infrastructure, hardware and reach. He sees Muse as a practical assistant for ordinary tasks, while Jordi Hays questions whether Meta’s devices will keep users beyond their initial appeal.

The Aspen Institute Financial Security Program’s Essential Wealth report argues that financial security cannot be measured by income and expenses alone: households also need savings and assets to absorb shocks, build for the future and make choices. Using 2022 data, the report estimates that 26% of U.S. households meet its essential-wealth threshold, while another 17% meet a lower threshold for emergent wealth. Aspen FSP presents the metric as a first version—a tool to identify gaps, not a solution to them—and argues that researchers, policymakers and institutions can use it to assess whether programs help families build wealth.

At Lenny and Friends Summit, Every co-founder and CEO Dan Shipper argued that product teams should not be expected to explore fast-changing AI capabilities while also delivering a roadmap. He proposed a small research lab to test new ideas in real work, discard most of them and pass the few that prove useful to the product team for further development. The aim, he said, is to make room for experimentation without making customers wait while the whole organization chases each new model.

Golden State Valkyries president Jess Smith says investment, alongside growing fan interest and media attention, is driving the team’s rapid growth. In a Masters of Scale interview with Jeff Berman, she argues that a women’s team should build for an audience beyond fans of men’s sports and establish a distinct identity before going to market. The Valkyries’ brand, she says, must give fans a reason to connect with the team beyond its roster.

Political scientist Robert Pape argues that support for political violence in the United States has spread beyond fringe groups and now exists on both sides of the political spectrum. Drawing on surveys by the University of Chicago’s Project on Security and Threats, he says that support does not mean respondents will act, but can give would-be attackers a sense of public approval. Pape warns that a close, disputed midterm result could turn that latent support into violence around Congress’s certification of the election.

Rafael Levi of Bright Data argues that robotics’ training-data bottleneck is not simply a shortage of video, but the difficulty of finding useful footage in the vast amount already online. Staged demonstrations can distort how people naturally perform tasks, while broad web-video downloads often discard most of what they collect: Levi cites rates of 96% for NVIDIA’s Cosmos pipeline and 74% for Stable Video Diffusion. His proposed alternative is to search for actions first and collect only matching clips, while retaining the need for robot-specific data and further processing.

Ken Burns argues that the founding’s importance lies not in a settled promise of freedom but in language of liberty and equality that later generations could use to challenge its exclusions. In a conversation with David Brooks, Burns describes a republic built to check human ambition and a commitment to religious toleration shaped by practical need and the risks of sectarian conflict. Both speakers present the founding as unfinished: its principles can guide efforts to repair the country, but do not resolve its present divisions.

In a set of demonstrations, Two Minute Papers’ Károly Zsolnai-Fehér argues that Claude Opus 5.5 can do more than generate convincing images: it reproduced a research simulation of honey coiling and built a virtual creature that learned to walk. The results are imperfect, and the walking simulation strained his local machine, but he presents them as evidence of a notable advance in AI-assisted scientific and engineering work. He also points to Anthropic’s system card to caution that evaluation awareness and the risk of errors remain unresolved.

Comedian and producer Druski argues that success is rarely overnight: his career took years of making videos before a major break, and repeated rejections from networks led him to finance his own shows. In an interview with Steven Bartlett, he traces his drive to a difficult childhood and a period of isolation that helped him recognize comedy as his purpose. His account pairs persistence with judgment: commit to the work, he says, but choose a path rather than waiting for gatekeepers to choose you.

Jensen Huang’s call to shut down AI labs was conditional, not a general argument for slowing development, TBPN host John Coogan argues: Huang said labs should stop if they conclude their experiments cannot be contained and will cause harm. Coogan says Huang instead treats risks that engineers understand and can fix as problems to solve, while arguing that companies face incentives and legal obligations to ship safe products. How liability would apply when an AI agent causes harm remains unsettled.

Apple is investigating a screenless fitness band that would focus on health and workout tracking, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports. He says it could be easier to wear overnight and last longer between charges than an Apple Watch, putting it in competition with devices such as Whoop and Oura. The project remains exploratory, with no dedicated development track toward release, Gurman says.

Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas argues that combining AI with machines operating in the physical world could multiply global GDP by eight to ten times, but says that prospect depends on rebuilding manufacturing capacity. He sees China’s strength across key supply chains as a constraint on US efforts to onshore production, and expects physical AI to develop through networks of connected machines rather than humanoid robots alone.

As AI systems move from generating responses to taking actions across company networks, Rosenblatt Securities analyst Catharine Trebnick says enterprises need new ways to track agents, their permissions and their activity. She argues that this is creating a cybersecurity opportunity for established providers such as CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks—and that more capable frontier models are more likely to add value to those platforms than displace them.

Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee argues that the Federal Reserve should not automatically look through negative supply shocks when they are likely to keep inflation above target. Unlike demand-driven overheating, a supply shock leaves the Fed to restrain demand against reduced productive capacity, risking larger losses in employment and output. In a conversation with Steven Davis, Goolsbee makes the case for responding to persistent supply-driven inflation, but not with the same force as to excess demand.

Anthropic’s new molecular biology group is using Claude to search large DNA datasets for proteins that scientists may not recognize or understand. The researchers say the model helps widen the pool of candidates, while they decide which ones merit experiments; in an early research program, they report finding a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats.

Vladimir Kara-Murza argues that the Kremlin’s repression of opponents undermines its claim that Russians support Vladimir Putin and the war in Ukraine. In a discussion with H.R. McMaster, he says Western governments repeatedly accommodated Putin as he tightened control at home and expanded aggression abroad, and urges them to target regime officials while supporting Russians who oppose the government.